Gadfly

​Crossing the Autocrat’s Crevasse

June 19th, 2022

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

A Most Important Question: How Do You Deprogram 52 Million Cult Members?

In a recent poll, 52 million Trumplicans of the gun cult said they were willing to sacrifice several thousand U.S. children each year in order to keep the Second Amendment on the books.

On top of this alarming declaration, our last two presidents have serious problems with reality. In a complex world going through climate change, autocracy, economic inequality, racial…

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​Empathy or Sociopathy?

June 19th, 2022

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Congress: Why Does Australia Have Only One-Tenth the COVID Death Rate?

The opening sentence about the COVID virus in “The Last Word” in THE WEEK magazine is shocking: “If the United States had the same death-rate as Australia, about 900,000 lives would have been saved.”

Other countries such as Japan, Kenya, and Norway had lower death rates than us, but Australia is the better comparison. We speak English, have similar demographic profiles, and…

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​Choice: Military Rifles or Democracy

June 4th, 2022

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

First, because of the intractability of the gun culture for forty years, and a Supreme Court that bases its firearm opinions on the flintlock musket, I propose that public K-12 and college and university professors in the country tell Congress: pass all necessary and reasonable gun safety and control laws to eliminate the gun culture that has flooded the entire country with firearms, or we will call a national strike on September 1, 2022, that will…

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​Going Ape and Crowing About It

May 28th, 2022

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Taking a Break From Politics While Watching Bird Brains

As a farm boy I always enjoyed feeding our animals and birds after helping to prepare the foods they all enjoyed, whether it was corn on the cob for pigs or silage chopped up for the cows for their winter buffet. Sometimes the horses got dessert in the form of a nosebag of oats. The geese, ducks, and chickens ate every seed and grain known to man before laying eggs and being eaten. Being French we…

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Killing Off the Middle Class

May 22nd, 2022

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

If You Want a Free University Education, Why Not Go to Europe?

Why are President Joe Biden and the White House in some kind of sleep mode? Very little is getting done! We can’t afford to go back to “normal,” Joe! Why does Bernie have to get on national news programs every Sunday and declare what our real problems are? Paying off student debt was a big deal during your campaign, along with other progressive goals to bring back a strong middle…

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​Abortion: Political, Moral, or Religious?

May 18th, 2022

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@mail.com

Basic Question: Do We Kill the Mother or the Fetus?

Abortion, in the simplest text, involves and confounds sex, love, hate, poverty and wealth.

Billions of dollars are exchanged by various genders as they seek sex around the world. Bangkok is aptly named. People pay thousands of dollars in airfare just to boast they had sex at high altitudes. We don’t know what happens on the International Space Station, but James Bond knows.

Some spend thousands on…

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​What Is Democracy?

May 8th, 2022

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

How Can We Know Democracy When We Have Never Experienced It?

Some Americans have said we had democracy when one rich man wrote that all men were “created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Evidently he didn’t mean women at all—or slaves who were only three-fifths of a man. A century and a half ago we killed 750,000 in a civil war and didn’t get an answer about democracy then—and we are still killing each other…

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​Hatred in the World

April 30th, 2022

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Man Was Made by Shock and Agony

The printing presses and all those tiny chips fill our eyes and ears every second with words and images of war, destruction, and the slaughter of human beings in Ukraine and other spots on the planet. Vladimir Putin is just one man blamed for creating most of those images. One of my favorite poets, Robinson Jeffers, has captured the scenes and sounds of the moment and given reasons better than most for why some people…

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Women as Leaders

April 23rd, 2022

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

What Do Republican and Democratic Women Stand For?

Have we lost our way? What are the values of a democracy?

In February of 1994, after many years of Russian subjugation, the president of Estonia listed the following values in a speech in Hamburg, Germany: ”(The values are) Freedom of every individual, the freedom of the economy and trade, the freedom of the mind, of culture and science, are inseparably connected.” In broad terms, with the two…

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​Miranda Was Half Right

April 9th, 2022

By Ed Raymond

fargogadly@gmail.com

Zebras Are Half Black and Half of Humans Are Above Average

In Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, Prospero’s daughter Miranda has been sheltered much of her life. After a storm maroons them on an island, she is exposed to some of the residents. In her naivety concerning humans, she exclaims, “Oh, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in it!”

Her father, who has seen many…

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